by Ann Angel
Introduction
The We-Are-Like-Everybody-Else Game
ELLEN WITTLINGER
Cupid’s Beaux
CYNTHIA LEITICH SMITH
Partial Reinforcement
KERRY COHEN
When We Were Wild
LOUISE HAWES
Lucky Buoy
CHRIS LYNCH
For a Moment, Underground
KEKLA MAGOON
Storm Clouds Fleeing from the Wind
ZOË MARRIOTT
Choices
MARY ANN RODMAN
Quick Change
E. M. KOKIE
Call Me!
RON KOERTGE
A Crossroads
J. L. POWERS
Little Wolf and the Iron Pin
KATY MORAN
Three-Four Time
ERICA L. KAUFMAN
We Were Together
ANN ANGEL
A Thousand Words
VARIAN JOHNSON
About the Contributors
Got a secret? Want to share? Two can keep a secret. I swear.
Or maybe not.
We’ve all tried to keep secrets — our own and those of our friends. We’ve crossed our hearts and promised that certain words would never pass our lips. But keeping secrets isn’t that easy. Sometimes we slip up and a secret comes spilling out before we realize we’re the one revealing it. Other times we deliberately reveal secrets with the intention of helping, or maybe even hurting, another.
By nature, secrets are exclusive. Private. Being the holder of a secret gives us tremendous power over the decision to share a secret and let someone into our inner circle or not. By making a friend a confidant of our secrets, we grant power and esteem. There’s no question that, even if we gain more power by bringing someone else into the circle, we are also betraying ourselves or someone else by revealing that secret to others. But the fact that secrets so quickly find their way beyond a circle of friends indicates our natural desire to belong and our urge to spread what we know despite the risks.
I’m not a secret keeper myself. It’s just too hard to keep track of who knows what. So I tell my family and friends not to share things with me if they don’t want them repeated.
Still, being in that circle of secrecy intrigues me so much that although I say I don’t want to know, I really do. During a writing workshop aptly named “Untold Stories,” I recognized that warning others away from sharing secrets with me might protect their secret selves, but it also left me out, as if I was the only one without status updates or a Twitter feed. I was suddenly ready to swear to silence if only I could hear one friend’s most private confession. It was probably at that moment that the idea for this anthology of secrets was born.
Writers are a tell-all bunch, so when I asked potential contributors if they’d want to write about the topic of our secret selves, they seized the theme and poured out tragic, dramatic, and funny stories of our secret keeping and revealing. They gave me stories of those turning-point moments when a kept or disclosed secret reveals an innermost fear. I read about secrets shattering lives and secrets saving a life or a soul.
Some of the stories included here show how we can be motivated and propelled by self-protective secrets. Kerry Cohen, Louise Hawes, Mary Ann Rodman, and debut writer erica l. kaufman share stories of teens whose secrets may shape their future lives. In contrast, Ellen Wittlinger and Ron Koertge look closely at how secrets can be so deep that we keep the truth from ourselves. Varian Johnson takes another turn and looks at the ways in which choosing either secret keeping or telling might betray a friendship. Katy Moran explores how secrets might play out in a fairy tale.
Although there are moments of humor in “Lucky Buoy,” Chris Lynch demonstrates the darker side of secrets, as do J. L. Powers, Kekla Magoon, and E. M. Kokie, who take readers on life-altering flights from the truth of our secret selves. Zoë Marriott creates a magical dance of secrets and truth in “Storm Clouds Fleeing from the Wind.” Secret keeping can also give us a sweet ride, as in Cynthia Leitich Smith’s “Cupid’s Beaux.”
The stories on these pages are an exciting journey of discovery into the many different and surprising secrets people keep. I enjoyed considering the diverse ways the teens on these pages keep secrets, bring confidants into the secret circle, or purposely betray a friend. With each tale, these writers are inviting you into their characters’ inner secrets. Come on in and share their stories.
Ann Angel
“Of course we’re going!” Claire says. She tosses her head that way she does, which means Don’t be stupid. I’m right! Her ponytail bounces from side to side as if it’s barely attached to her head.
“But we don’t have dates,” Maya says. “At my other school —”
“You’re not at your other school anymore,” Claire says. “At Throckmorton all the sophomores go to the Sophomore Semi. You don’t need a date.” She screws up her face as if a date is something disgusting you might have to scrape off the bottom of your shoe, even though I happen to know that Claire would give her left earlobe for a boyfriend.
“Well, not all the sophomores go,” I say, although not very loudly. Maya smiles at me in an encouraging way. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any other friend but Claire, and I’m enjoying the triangle we’ve become since Maya started at Throckmorton this fall. I guess over the years I forgot that a person could actually disagree with Claire, that you didn’t have to pretend that she was always a hundred percent right.
Claire rolls her eyes. “Most of them do. God, Lucy, do you have to pick apart everything I say? Are you trying to start an argument?”
“Sorry,” I say, backing off. I’ve never been able to stand up to Claire. She’s the only person who knows what goes on at my house, and she’s kept the secret for years.
“I’ll go if Lucy goes,” Maya says, which surprises me.
“Of course she’s going,” Claire says. “We’re all going.”
“What do you wear to a semiformal?” Maya wants to know.
“Any pretty dress,” Claire says. “You know, short, sleeveless, that kind of thing.”
Maya nods. “That’s easy enough.”
It doesn’t sound easy to me, which, of course, Claire knows. She narrows her eyes at me, and I can read the message clearly: I’ll help you figure something out. But you owe me. I always owe Claire. I probably always will.
Mom is still at work when I get home from school. She works part-time at a library, keeping the books organized on the shelves, which is hilarious if you think about it, which I do.
I go in through the garage door because it’s the only one that opens all the way. You can’t get in the front door at all anymore. It barely opens wide enough for a cat to slip through due to the stacks of magazines on both sides of the hallway, four feet high and getting deeper all the time. Mom tries to pile them higher, but the top ones keep sliding off onto the floor, where they stay, a carpet of New Yorkers and National Geographics on which we slide into the kitchen.
The kitchen is the worst room. For some reason there are more things that can’t be thrown away in the kitchen than in any of the other rooms. And some of those things, because they once held food, stink. There’s no place to eat in there anymore — the table and chairs and countertops are stacked with papers, old clothes, empty food containers, all sorts of useless garbage. The sink is always full of dirty dishes. I used to wash them, until I realized there was no point to it. If the sink wasn’t full of dishes, Mom would just start storing something else there — books, cloth napkins, half-burned candles. Now I just wash two plates, two glasses, two forks, the basics we need to eat a meal.
Here’s the thing: Stuff that’s trash to other people — junk mail, cash
-register receipts, empty Entenmann’s coffee-cake boxes, baby clothes that haven’t fit me in fourteen years — all of it is important to my mother. Essential. If she notices anything missing from one of her piles — and she does notice — she starts to panic and cry. Which makes me cry. Anything that comes into our house has to stay in our house.
“Hi, sweetie!” Mom calls as she comes in from the garage. She’s got a bucket of chicken in one hand and a plastic bottle of iced tea in the other. More stuff that will never leave. I try not to think about it.
“Chicken again?” I ask, though the answer is obvious.
“I love the spicy coating they use at that new place,” Mom says, but she blushes. It embarrasses her that she can’t cook in her own kitchen anymore. Maybe she’s even more embarrassed by it than I am. I don’t know. We don’t talk about it.
We put the chicken pieces on the two clean plates and pour ourselves glasses of iced tea. Dinner is always eaten in the living room because that’s the only place we can sit down. I manage to keep enough space clear on the couch for us to sit, side by side, surrounded by stacks of laundry (clean or dirty, who can remember?) that lean against our shoulders like hungry ghosts. There are two chairs in the living room, too, but they’ve been buried in trash since my father moved out nine years ago.
“How was your day?” Mom asks.
“Okay. Um, Claire thinks we should go to the Sophomore Semiformal this weekend.”
“Oh, that sounds like fun!” She grins and claps her hands. I know she means it sounds normal. More than anything, she wants me to be normal, in spite of the way we live.
“Yeah, I guess. I need something to wear, though.” I don’t know why I’m even bringing this up. Mom barely makes enough money to pay for these greasy take-out dinners every night. There’s not enough left for a pretty dress, short and sleeveless. And she’ll feel bad that there isn’t.
“I can probably borrow something from Claire,” I say quickly as her face clouds over. I used to do that a lot before my hips got so wide that I ripped out the seams in one of her favorite skirts. “Or maybe Maya.” Maya is closer to my size, but of course I could never ask her. I’d have to reveal too much.
“That’s your new friend, isn’t it?” Mom’s eyes are glittery. “Maybe she could come over sometime. I’d like to meet her.”
I nod. “Uh-huh.” This is a game we play. The We-Are-Like-Everybody-Else game. Even though we both know that Maya is never going to set foot inside our poor, ruined house.
“Try this on,” Claire says as she shoves a shiny purple cocktail dress at me.
I push it back at her. “No! It’s your mother’s!”
Maya has come with us to Claire’s house on this mission to find an outfit in which I will not look completely pathetic or ridiculous, and I’m mortified to have her here, watching. She perches on Claire’s mother’s white bedspread as Claire rummages through the closet.
“Mom doesn’t care. She said you could wear anything that fits.”
“But I’m not as . . . big . . . as your mother.” Do I really need to point this out? Claire’s mother is beautiful, but she weighs twice as much as I do.
“This is an old dress. It’s too small for her now. And besides, she said she’d take it in for you. Hem it up. Whatever.”
Claire’s mother and mine used to be friends before things got so bad. She’s always trying to help me out, and I usually appreciate it, but really? Now I have to wear her old, outgrown, hemmed-up, middle-aged-lady clothes?
I take the hanger with the baggy purple dress from Claire and try not to look at Maya. Does she think I’m too poor to buy my own clothes? That’s embarrassing enough. If she knows anything more than that, I will pass out right here on the thick beige carpet. But how could she? Claire is the only one who knows, and she won’t tell.
I slip the dress over my head and pull it down. Before I even look in a mirror, I know it’s monstrously too big. The straps fall down over my shoulders and the waist sits on my hips.
Claire laughs. “Oops. I guess not.” She turns back to the closet. “There must be something in here you can wear.”
“I bet you could wear one of my dresses,” Maya says. “We’re about the same size.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I say, my cheeks burning with shame. “I can just wear . . .” But there’s no end for that sentence. There’s nothing for me to wear at my house. The only clean clothes I have are a few pairs of jeans and three or four T-shirts that never leave my bedroom except when I sneak them to the Laundromat. The other clothes that are piled around the house have mostly been in those piles for a decade, and if I move anything, Mom will know. Anyway, a pretty dress is not suddenly going to appear from beneath all that muck.
“Or, wait!” Maya jumps off the bed. “You know what would be fun? Let’s go to the Goodwill and try stuff on!”
Oh, my God! She thinks I’m so poor I need to shop at the Goodwill! Which, in fact, is where I got the jeans and T-shirts I wear, but even Claire doesn’t know that.
But Maya keeps talking. “We used to always go to the Goodwill in Burlington. You can find stuff for just a few dollars that’s hardly been worn!”
Claire wrinkles her nose. “I don’t want to wear somebody else’s clothes.”
Maya puts her hands on her hips. “Why not? You were just trying to get Lucy to wear your mother’s old clothes. What’s the difference?”
“Well, for one thing, my mother takes care of her clothes. Her clothes are clean.”
“The clothes at Goodwill are clean. Sometimes they’re new, with the original tags still on them.”
Claire glares at me. “Lucy doesn’t want to buy somebody else’s crummy old dress, do you, Lucy?” What she means is Lucy does what I tell her to do.
But Maya’s excitement has infected me, and I forget for a moment that I have to do whatever Claire says. The few times I’ve gone to the Goodwill before, I’ve darted in and out quickly, hoping no one I know would see me. But Maya wants to go for fun — as if it’s an adventure.
“Actually, I like the idea of shopping at the Goodwill,” I say. “But I’ll have to go home and get some money first.” Thank God I haven’t spent the twenty-five dollars my dad sent me for my birthday. That’ll go a long way at Goodwill. “Why don’t you guys go on over and I’ll meet you there?”
But then I see the furious look in Claire’s eyes and I know I’m in trouble.
“Your house is on the way,” she says. “We might as well go with you.”
“My key only opens the back door,” I lie, as they follow me through the maze of junk in the garage. Even though she’s been here before, Claire’s looking all around as if she’s never seen so much crap in her life. Maya is sneaking little looks, too, but pretending not to.
Okay, I think, Claire is teaching me a lesson. I’m supposed to agree with her, always, and lately I haven’t been keeping up my end of the bargain. But she’s my friend. She wouldn’t betray me now, not after all these years. My hands tremble as I put the key into the lock. I turn to look at Claire once more, hoping that my eyes communicate with her the way hers do with me. I trust you, I tell her. I’ve always trusted you. Please don’t do this.
“I’ll run in quickly,” I say, opening the door just far enough to squeeze through. “You guys can wait —”
“Let’s all go in,” Claire says, and she shoves the door open wide.
And there it is: the kitchen, in all its rotten, filthy chaos. Claire stands back so Maya has a good view of the horror. I turn to see what she’s seeing, and my stomach lurches. There’s a skinny pathway through the junk from the door to the sink, piled high with crusty dishes, and from there to the broken refrigerator, whose door no longer closes and whose shelves display garbage. I’m pretty sure Maya can smell the decay of my life from the doorstep, where she’s stopped to gape in astonishment.
“Looks like your mom didn’t have time to clean up today,” Claire says, smirking.
I don’t even look at Cla
ire. Now I’ll never have to look at her again, which I realize immediately is at least one good thing. But Maya’s eyes are on me, her expression so sad and sympathetic I want to scream. Which I do.
“Go away! Both of you! Just go away!” I slam the door in their faces and lock it, as if they were just dying to get inside my craptastic house.
I know I’m going to throw up, so I head for the bathroom. The sink in there is full of empty shampoo bottles and hairbrushes and whatever else, but thank God the toilet is usable. How long Claire and Maya stand in the garage, I have no idea. All I can manage to do for the next hour or so is lean on the porcelain bowl and empty out the lie I’ve been telling myself for years: that Claire is my friend, my best and only trusted friend.
By the time Mom gets home from work, I’m lying on my bed. I tell her I’m not feeling well, and she doesn’t ask questions. She knows that sometimes I just have to be alone in my room, the one space in the house that is not filled with trash.
I hear the doorbell, but I don’t get up. Every now and then somebody comes by to get us to sign a petition or to convert us to their religion or something, but we never answer the bell and before long they go away. Only this time I think I hear my mother talking to someone. In our house. Which is impossible.
I’m just about to get up and see what’s going on when there’s a knock at my door. Mom sticks her head in.
“Are you feeling better? Your friend is here,” she says.
I jump up. “Claire’s here? Tell her to go away!”
But when the door opens, it’s Maya who’s standing there next to my mother. “Can I come in?” she asks.
I don’t know what to say, but she walks in anyway.
“So nice to meet you, Maya,” Mom says as she backs away. “Come over anytime.”
Maya and I stand and stare at each other for what feels like half an hour.
Finally she says, “Your mom seems nice.”
I sigh. “Yeah, she is nice. Even though she’s crazy.”
Maya smiles. “A lot of mothers are crazy.” She looks around at my neat shelves and my shoes lined up by the bureau. “Your room is pretty.”
